I read some good news for small businesses in Canada who use PayPal to receive credit card payments. The transaction costs have dropped by $0.25. I’m happy, especially since our print-bingo.com transactions upgrade price for Premium access price is currently $10 so percentage wise, the extra $0.25 has a noticeable benefit on our margins. *
The percentage that PayPal takes also drops if you’ve gone past the 3000 per month bracket.
In my humble opinion, PayPal is now an even better deal for small scale web sites. The threshold where I would spend the time and money to move to a merchant account with a bank just got bumped up by a lot. I’ve helped set up a “proper” merchant account for a client in the past, and it’s not fun nor cheap. And programming for PayPal is really nice in comparison.
Also note that the entry level currency conversion for Canadians at 2.5% still stinks.
At Perceptus, we use a US based USD chequing account through RBC Centura where we withdraw our funds in USD. Then we either convert to CAD with the somewhat better bank exchange rate, or we pay Leonard in USD to avoid exchange costs altogether.
The PayPal blog post is here: http://www.thepaypalblog.com/weblog/2008/06/lowered-fees-fo.html
* Hmm… what’s with that emphasis on the word “currently”?